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2009 Is Looking a Lot Like 1993

By The New York Times October 20, 2007 11:09 amOctober 20, 2007 11:09 am

In his Web column, Tom Redburn writes that the early debate among Democratic economic policy mavens is breaking along similar lines as 1993, the last election in which the party took control of both Congress and the White House:

For many Democrats, the coming election promises not just the hope of a presidential victory, but the realistic prospect of entering 2009 in control of both Congress and the White House in the same way when Bill Clinton assumed office in 1993.

That was a long time ago, when the economy was in a far different condition than it is today. But in some ways the early debate among Democratic economic policy mavens is already breaking along similar lines.

“The last time Democrats really had a vibrant debate about what kind of economic policy we should have was in 1993,” said Andrei Cherney, founder and co-editor of “Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.” “But now the question is whether the right answer in 1993 is still the right answer for 2009. And that’s an issue we can’t wait until 2009 to confront.”

The Democratic Party is hoping for a win of the presidency and both houses of Congress. That said, it would be a good idea if the party leadership was more open to an honest dialogue with its members. The kind of conversation that allows for dissent from the party position. The party has to run a candidate who is universally admired by and acceptable to the various segments of the party, as well as to the Independent voters who will not align any longer with either party. If this is not the centerpiece issue, along with economic policy formulation, then the Democratic Party will not prevail. So far, that is not happening. The Democratic machine has already selected Hillary Clinton as the nominee. How could they get it so wrong, so consistently?

Could the Clinton campaign be a little more precise regarding the term “return to fiscal discipline”?

Senator Clinton’s explanation for funding many of the expanded and new entitlement programs she has been promising are funded with this “return to fiscal discipline”.

The press has conveniently softballed her on this critical dimension of her platform…

Most of her platform is a big entitlement pander.

And as for the policy wonks debating their economic approach… they should hold on and hope that Citibank and the other global institutions pull themselves back from the brink… big trouble on Wall Street still…

Did anybody take into mind that the economy should never be disrupted by inordinate means. The study and reading of books on Macroeconomics and Microeconomics reveals this. These books spell out everything about the economy and how it can be changed. These books tell the truth about the organization of economics. Maybe all the candidates should read these two books. Need I say more!

Given the neglect of our infrastructure and our national institutions, we must address those problems, immediately upon chasing the RepubliCons across the Rubicon. We must address the corporate problem in America, from wages and pensions to relocations and briberies of our elected officials. Also, the issue of paying their fair share of taxes, a small price they must pay for hauling away exorbitant profits. These are a few of the issues I would like to see and hear addressed by our, Democratic, candidates. Make America whole, again, vote Democrat.
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, BRING THEM HOME, ALIVE. NOW.

Although the broad issues may look similar between 1993 and the present 2008 election time but looking at both the tax revenue and expenditure side(balancing the budget) there is a lot of contrast.There was no cost of managing the marketing of war on terror(read Iraq/Afghanistan wars)there was no issues like outsourcing the american jobs overseas .There was no threat of crude oil crossing three digit figures and no sub-prime housing loan issues derailing the economy.Only the least common denominator between 1993 and now is ‘balancing the budget’ which sadly, has been deleted from GWB’s lexicon since he took the office .Moreover it was Bill Clinton’s the oft reapeated phrase.Let’s hope the leading runners on the democratic side for the present race come out with a concrete/workable plans to cut the deficit and put the derailed economy back on rails.

If a recession does materialize as forcasted, democrats could add the economy as yet another impetus for change at 1600 Pensylvania Ave. If this does occur, it could become a cake-walk to the White House for any democrat-except Hillary Clinton!

CUMMING, Ga. – With water supplies rapidly shrinking during a drought of historic proportions, Gov. Sonny Perdue declared a state of emergency Saturday for the northern third of Georgia and asked President Bush to declare it a major disaster area.

Georgia officials warn that Lake Lanier, a 38,000-acre reservoir that supplies more than 3 million residents with water, is less than three months from depletion. Smaller reservoirs are dropping even lower.

Perdue asked the president to exempt Georgia from complying with federal regulations that dictate the amount of water released from Georgia’s reservoirs to protect federally protected mussel species downstream.

More than a billion gallons of water is released from Lanier every day. The Corps of Engineers bases its water releases on two requirements: The minimum flow needed for a coal-fired power plant in Florida and mandates to protect two mussel species in a Florida river.

“We’ve learned from this what a blunt weapon the Endangered Species Act has become,” said state Rep. John Linder. “We need to understand this lake was created not for mussels but for people.”

Georgia lawmakers say neighboring states also are exploiting the law as a tool to draw more water from Georgia’s lakes.

LA: So, major drought, brought on by unpredictable weather patterns (linked to “global warming,” which is just another way of saying “increased system entropy, or chaos”) leads a Georgia governor (of course) to ask for federal disaster relief (subsidized loans and emergency aid to help out big-wig property owners), while also asking the feds to stop directing water to help the ecosystem and to maintain the water running to a coal-fired power plant in Florida, so nobody hears about what’s really happening on the TEEvee.

The democrats have caved in to Bush to such an extent it is truly repulsive.

They can plot and scheme and do all sorts of whirling around, but it doesn’t affect anything. If HRC is elected it will be the same old preemptive war-stuff with the same old torture-stuff(smart-interrogation). I am no longer outraged! It’s just the way it is!

There is much that is similar to 1993. Once again, the Republicans have taken a great economy and run it into the ground for the benefit of their corporate buddies. What may be different this time around is that corporate campaign donations are, according to recent Times articles, shifting away from Republican presidential hopefuls.

Rubin’s economic policies, enacted during Clinton’s heyday, were the dagger in the heart of the dying American industrial age. We cannot survice as a service-based economy, and that is exactly what Rubin’s policies have led to.
Where will the money go to purchase the equipment necessary to rebuild the infrastructure? Certainly not to the thousands of closed down factories in this country. We will send our dollars overseas in order to restore infrastructure.

Reich’s policies, sadly, will never have the cumulative effect they might have twenty years ago. The only bright spot is that we are once again having a debate on economic policy. Under Republican control, all we get are mismanagement and supply-side mythology.

The next president will face a similar, but not nearly as severe recession as did FDR. The income distribution needs attention. Paul Krugman in his new book provides the road map–he states “Middle class economies don’t emerge automatically— they have to be created through political action. A few other items such as implementing universal health care and taking the “insurance concept” out of health care; rebuilding an educated workforce; and rebuilding infrastructure. The Democrats do not appear ready or up to the task.

The details don’t matter so much as the well established and historical fact that Democrats can be counted upon to look after the interests of the wage earner first, last and always.

If you draw a paycheck, you are pretty dense if you fail to vote Democratic, it stands to reason.

Point in fact is the boost in the minimum wage that Democrats accomplished in the first weeks that they took control of the Congress and after Republicans had stalled the issue year after year.

While the Democrats don’t yet have the votes in the Congress to accomplish much of what they really want to do — i.e., bring the troops home from Iraq; provide health care for children, etc., — when they do have the votes, it’s wage earners that are benefited.

The poor, the wage earners, the pensioners, the middle income folks can always count on Democrats as their champions and their defenders.

anyone old enough to recall the disappearance of the deficit– and fears that the debt would disappear also– at the start of the century, should be a bit wary about predicting how much money will be available– and what priorities most popular– when the next president takes office. few Dems deny there’s more to life than balancing budgets, but projecting priorities is difficult and dangerous. if we could cut homeland security spending in half (and who knows) that’d free up more than a few $s for other purposes.

A recession will definitely sink the Republicans for the next two decades. Their leading candidate Rudy is nothing more than Bush 11; constant war, racist strife and divisiveness all rap in one.The middle class has all but disappeared under Republican leadership; never have so much been wasted in so little time.Not one of their candidates are appealing to the average voter.

Demographics may not be destiny, but it is often pretty close to it. If that is the case, the U. S. is in big trouble, even with with immigrants and their offspring keeping us from a population implosion. Demographics involves more than numbers, however; it involves the quality of the population, often in terms of traits that cannot be easiy measured. And this is where we are really in trouble. The printed word (and all the mental infrastructure that that involvles) is simply alien to ever larger segments of our population. In short, lower-case culture is vital.

These realities seem to escape the attention of most leading Democrats. Their solution to almost everything is simply the word “more” repeated as a mantra. The Democrats of 2007 are no more in touch with reality than were the Democrats of 2003. Sadly, the Republicans have abandoned all pretense to valuing lower-case republicanism, especially the virtue of restraint. Both parties are captive to narrowly defined interests and pressures. Outlook: bleak.

As one of the New Yorkers who gave him his 29% of the vote in the 1992 Democratic Primary despite his prior announcement that he was giving up against Bill Clinton, I miss my guy the late Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts. Our show of defiance motivated Bill Clinton to take the national deficit seriously and sent him an unmistakable message that we did not appreciate pandering to the voters and telling them what they wanted to hear when strong leadership was actually called for. Those were the days.

I’m sorry, but your comment that Mr. Rubin won the argument and “ushered in a record long recovery” is false on two fronts. First, the economic expansion that encompassed the Clinton Administration, was 10 years long. It began in March of 1991, one year and 8 months before Mr. Clinton was elected and one year and 10 months before he took office. So the recovery was a toddler before Mr. Rubin had a chance to do anything.

Second, the first thing Mr. Clinton tried to do was not balance the budget, but pass an economic stimulus package. He failed to pass his package in Congress, which was the first of several legislative failures that ushered in (to borrow a phrase) the 1994 Republican Congressional landslide, which any honest evaluator of that era would agree was the main reason that deficit reduction and a balanced budget actually occurred.

Recall that Mr. Gingrich was blamed for shutting down the government when Mr. Clinton refused to sign bills that would have cut spending. And when the Republicans in Congress tried to get Mr. Clinton to commit to a goal date for a balanced budget, he would change his goal nearly daily, but never commit to a balanced budget that occurred within his own term in office.

It was by pure luck that the economy continued to expand so strongly for so long, which produced record tax revenues despite several Republican passed tax cuts. Anyone remember the Asian contagion? Anyone remember Mr. Greenspan stimulating the American economy to help bail out the Asian tigers?

There are an awful lot of myths told about the Clinton Administration’s years in office. And sadly, there is nobody at this paper seemingly capable of honestly dealing with them.

Also, regarding the “return to fiscal discipline”, the 2007 fiscal year ended last month with a deficit of $162.8B. This is down 63% from just a few years ago and puts us on a path to balance in the next couple of years barring a serious economic downturn.

I wonder if the Democratic Party is hoping for an extension of the recovery or a recession to help them sell their same old song and dance…

Given the angry mood the American people are in now, it is almost a certainty that the Democrats will capture the White House as well as the Congress.

In the House, they will very likely get veto-proof majorities; in the Senate they could likewise get filibuster-proof majorities.

In the event, a Democratic administration will be confronted with long-festering and serious problems which need to be addressed seriously and effectively.

On the domestic front, they will have to craft an economy policy which will have to deal effectively with the threat of inflation, coupled with an economic downturn with unemployment likely to rise to an annual average rate of 5% and GNP possibly dipping well below anywhere from 2% to 1% annually.

They will need to try to cut the Federal budget deficits, now running at an annual average of from $300 to $400 billion, down to more manageable levels over time, but if the economic downturn by around the end of 2008 appears to worsen, a Democratic administration will very likely have to increase Federal spending selectively in ways which will have a positive impact on the economy.

Significant cuts over time may have to be made to the Defense budget, and the resulting savings employed elsewhere. Mismanagement and corruption together eat up a huge portion of the Defense budget.

If a Democratic admistration succeeds in redeploying and withdrawing forces out of Iraq within a year from January next year, leaving only enough to continue to train and logistically support the Iraqi military and police, very substantial savings could be realized and part of it used where it will produce beneficial economic ripple effects.

A Democratic administration will have to deal more effectively with the need for tax reform with simplication the primary objective. Refinements will need to be made to the Alternative Minimum Tax so that families in the middle-income brackets are placed outside its scope.

The problem of insolvency confronting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will need to be addressed more seriously and more aggressively. The President and the Congress can no longer afford to postpone decisive action on these entitlement programs, with baby boomers already starting to make their claims on these entitlements in droves. They have to “bite the bullet,” fully realizing that no solution will be free from pain.MarPatalinjug@aol.com

With the booming, booming, booming Bush economic boom continuing to boom and boom and boom, why does the Democrat party want to end the booming Bush economic boom with their thoroughly discredited Marxist/socialist economic theories? Also, Tom Redburn alleges: “Mr. Rubin won that debate, helping usher in a record-long economic expansion led by private investment in new technologies that lasted through the entire decade.” Evidently, Mr. Redburn was on Mars from 1991 until 1993 because the economic expansion had been well under way for almost two years by the time Boy Clinton assumed office.

The health care system is broken. It went off the rails starting in the 1980s when low-cost, non-profit or not-for-profit entities like Blue Cross were privatized. Benefits kept getting squeezed in order to create profits for high corporate salaries and shareholder dividends. Congress should buy-out the stockholder equity of such entities and return them to non-profit or not-for-profit status as the first step in restoring sanity to the health system. Then coverage could be expanded to a certain extent without raising premiums. Only after all this is done first should additional coverage be provided for additional premiums. What I am afraid may happen, though, is that the profit-driven model may be allowed to persist AND more high-cost patients will be forced into the system. This is what happened with HIV-AIDS (not that this is the sole cost of higher premiums, but it is a big one) and this is why premiums are so high now and benefits so low.

I owe my life to BushJr. and the sacred republican party. I have been able to save tons of money on illegal migraint help. Regarless what anybody says these people work hard and work overtime for free. BushJr. respects the wealthy by allowing the trickle down economics to build a strong humble people. You may not thank him now but when we are all rolling in excess; Free prisons, free military facilities, and the right to question government activities, you democrats will have to apoligize.

President Obama drew criticism on Thursday when he said, “we don’t have a strategy yet,” for military action against ISIS in Syria. Lawmakers will weigh in on Mr. Obama’s comments on the Sunday shows.Read more…